When purchasing home interior furniture and accessories, several factors determine what color to choose. People imagine how the item will look when it is actually placed in the room, and anticipate whether it will fit in the room or create the image they want. In order to help people make such decisions in stores and online shopping, we analyzed the relationship between room color and item color.Therefore, we prepared a home interior photo, processed the color of one item in the photo, and asked the subjects about their impressions. The color of the item was picked up from the colors used in the picture to harmonize with the impression of the room. Through the experiment, we found that even the color of a small item can affect the impression of the entire room, and that the color can easily change the impression.

Haptic technology provides users with an experience that is unattainable via audiovisual information alone. Researchers have previously attempted to synchronize tactile information with video to enhance the multimedia experience, although their studies were based on the assumption that visual information is present. Tactile stimuli usually act as additional information for a story and do not normally arouse people’s imagination regarding a story; a door opening, water dripping onto the floor, or someone walking across the floor is usually presented through visual information. In this study, we propose the “Otogi Box,” a cubic haptic interface that tells a story through tactile stimuli. The haptic interface provides a whole new user experience, letting them feel a story unfold in their hands. The interface independently vibrates each of its faces to provide various touch sensations using audio signals, in a manner that fits a specific story. We present “Dwarf’s House” as a demo story, wherein users feel that a dwarf realistically enters and exits the box. For instance, the right face vibrates as if a door is opening when the dwarf opens the door on the right side of the house. User evaluation was conducted to test the basic storytelling capabilities of the interface. The results revealed that the proposed interface could effectively present a simple story through tactile sense without any visual information, and enabled stimulation of users’ imagination in a unique manner.

It is well known that human sensitivity to color and expressive ability varies with age and gender. In addition, the perception, understanding, and comprehension of color vary according to developmental stage and color-related experiences.

This study is one approach to research to clarify the relationship between such "sense of color" as above and the developmental stages of children.

In this study, the coloring behavior of teenage subjects; elementary school, junior high school, and university students, to coloring book images were investigated using iPads. The characteristics of coloring and color schemes used in the coloring books were analyzed in order to explore the relationship with the developmental stages of the children.

The coloring book images; mandala-like patterns, used in the investigation were designed originally based on some preliminary investigations. Also the original palette of colors systematically arranged in hues and tones, was specified in order to quantitatively analyze the characteristics of the colors used in the coloring book.

The results showed that the hues of colors used with high frequency in coloring books changed as the developmental stage progressed, and that the range of tones by the combination of saturation and lightness widened.
It was also found that the color schemes were simple and easy to understand at younger ages, while the complexity of the color schemes increased as the children grew older.

To design affective spaces that promote stabilized living experience and user well-being, it is necessary to consider and be aware of how multiple perceptual information interact and influence the way we perceive space i.e. multimodal perception. This study aims to gain an understanding of how sensory cues influence the emotional evaluation of the spatial design. We analyzed how the change in levels of spatial elements was emotionally perceived in the presence and absence of scent and color. The results from the study presented that both scent and color significantly affected the emotional response to change in levels of spatial elements in different ways. The findings suggest that (1) in the absence of both color and scent, the spatial elements interacted to affect the participants’ moods related to being confused and feeling strained and tensed, (2) in the presence of a cool color (purple) and relaxing scent (lavender), spatial elements interacted to affect the participants’ mood related to feeling strained and tensed, (3) in the presence of a warm color (orange) and stimulating scent (orange), spatial elements interacted to affect the participants’ mood related to being unhappy. The findings of the study are worthy as they provide an insight into the influence of multimodality in spatial perception. They will help establish guidelines for incorporating perceptual information in spatial designs that provide stabilized living experience and enhanced individual well-being.